San Francisco – While blogs continue to simmer with complaints from people who waited months to buy an iPhone and now are experiencing problems activating it, AT&T Inc. said Sunday that the situation has improved.
“We are working on any issues on an individual basis with customers who were impacted,” said Michael Coe, a spokesman for AT&T, the Apple device’s exclusive carrier. Nearly all customers have been able to activate their phones within five to eight minutes, he said.
Without activation, not even the phone’s alarm clock works, leading some unhappy customers to joke that their inactive iPhones are little more than expensive paperweights.
AT&T attributed the problems to overloaded servers as large number of customers tried to activate their phones over the weekend. After the initial onslaught, AT&T made technical adjustments to its activation system so that new users wouldn’t face the same delays, Coe said.
Customers with corporate accounts might experience delays because AT&T needs authorization from the telecommunications manager at their company to switch them to an individual account, he said.
Timothy Johnson, 36, of Collegeville, Pa., said his phone was activated Sunday afternoon, about two days after he bought it.
“The experience of the activation is unacceptable,” Johnson said. “It all just reeks of ill- preparedness to me.”
Johnson said he was happy with the iPhone and credited Apple for acknowledging the problem. But he expressed concern about the type of service he would get from AT&T in the future.
Rob Enderle, an industry analyst with The Enderle Group, said the activation problems probably won’t hurt iPhone sales.
